What you describe is basically what we've just changed to. It may be possible in the future to have the awesome quality in most cases, with the new kind of emergency case that's still generally pretty good. We're going to make whatever changes we can that make everything better.

Just wanted to reply and let you know that I think I've answered your question in the edit to my post.

It sounds like you are reverting something that was great?

It worked really great, almost all the time. However, this thread is full of examples of what happens when it says "You've been waiting way too long. We're going to let you bypass the rules." We need to have something like that for any rule we write, which means we also need to make sure than when the rules are bypassed, things are still generally okay.

I'd love to be able to have every party set its own, very strict, limits, and have them obeyed at all times. Unfortunately, it's not mathematically possible to do that, and have reasonable wait times. This is a trade-off we had to make a decision on. We're going to keep looking at different solutions.

The visible ranks may be imbalanced, but it's possible those Diamond 1's are on a trajectory to #1 grandmaster, and just haven't gotten through their promotions yet. I'm not able to share whether that's the case for this specific game though.

Could you give more detail on why you feel like this game shouldn't have been made?

Hello everyone,
We’re looking into these reports this morning. Thanks to those of you who’ve provided unedited screenshots of loading screens, that’s one of the easiest ways for us to find the specific match and look at our logs for it.

While we evaluate ways we can make this kind of situation better as quickly as we can, I do want to call out that these types of matches are, on the whole, extremely unlikely. They’re a result of one of the ways we trade match requirements (like keeping all ranks in a game close) for wait time, and are very rarely necessary.

EDIT

Hey all, wanted to give you an update and a bit more detail on what happened here.

We’ve seen a lot of feedback reading something like “I only waited for 15 seconds, and I got placed in this match: (screenshot of game with obvious flaws). This shouldn’t happen.” We look into as many of these reports as we can. There have been several that exposed flaws in our system that slipped through our testing and metrics. Most of the time, though, we find out that we made that game for someone who’s waited quite a bit longer than we hope. Because our system is anxious to get them out of the queue and into a game, we’ve relaxed some rule so we can do that. The most common example players will see is a group of 5 against all solos. It could be that all 5 of those solos just queued up, but maybe the group of 5 has been patient for the last several minutes and we want to make sure they can play our game.

There’s a reason players make these posts. An instant match gives a feeling that this is a “perfect game for me.” Then a loading screen pops up, and you see something like a rank disparity, a level 2 with all level 40s, a team with no supports against a team with double supports. We don’t show other players’ wait times, nor any indication of whom we “made the game for.” For some background, our matchmaker works (on a very basic level) by picking one party, setting rules for a game that contains that party based on several factors, including their wait time, then finding players who fit the rules and putting the game together.

Based on this general feedback theme, we tried something different for the new Ranked system. Rather than letting our “focus party” determine all the limits for which ranks are allowed in a game, each party has their own ranges of rank with whom they’re willing to match. This lets us make harder guarantees on things like this:

When you queue up as a Platinum 1, you’ll get a game with only Plat 1 and Diamond 5, or a game with only Plat 1 and Plat 2. Almost all of the time.

That "almost" is the killer though. There are only two rules in the matchmaker that cannot be broken no matter how long a player waits:
• 5 players to a team, 2 teams.
• Only one of any certain hero per team.

Everything else needs to be negotiable so that we can reliably make games for all players, without killing wait times. Each of our game modes has a different set of priorities on the rules, and the rank rule is the highest priority for Hero League. So, to speak to one specific example here (prepare for technical speak). One screenshot in this thread is of 2 Singapore site Grandmaster players in a party, who got into a game with 8 players in Bronze 2 and Bronze 3. At the time the game was formed, there were also several diamond players in queue who had selected, or had a good ping to, the Singapore site. However, there were not 8 players who all were within 1 division of each other. When the Grandmaster party waited long enough that their party started to ignore this specific rule, they went hunting for a selection of 8 players that were all fine to play with each other (without thinking about wild Grandmasters), and slipped into the Bronze game.

It’s a pretty terrible, though rare, edge case, that affects a small group of players consistently. The solution, though, requires a trade-off. We’ve just deployed a change to the matchmaker that makes our rank rule similar to our other rules: defined by the “focus party” for whom we’re making the game. This helps us get rid of nearly all cases like the really awful looking games in this thread. However, it means that we can’t guarantee that you’ll always have those games of pure Diamond 1's. High level players may start to see slightly larger rank spreads in their games (for example, Masters occasionally seeing Diamond 4’s; shouldn’t often get as extreme as a Master seeing a Platinum). We think the trade-off will be worth it. As always, we look forward to your feedback. Good luck in the Nexus!